Communication Sciences and Disorders

Title: "Beyond the Audiogram: Data-Driven Insights to Precision Audiology"

Speaker: Varsha M. Athreya, Ph.D.

Speech perception in noise (SPIN) varies widely across individuals, even among those with similar pure-tone averages (PTA), highlighting a fundamental limitation of the most used metric in hearing care. While PTA offers a convenient summary of hearing sensitivity, it ignores audiometric configuration and has limited ability to predict real-world communication outcomes, hearing-aid benefit...

Title: "Mapping the Hearing Phenome: From Comorbidity to Causality"

Speaker: Ishan Bhatt, PhD, CCC-A

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have reshaped biomedical research by enabling large-scale, data-driven discovery of genetic influences on complex traits. The integration of genomic data with electronic health records in large population biobanks has extended this framework to phenome-wide investigation, allowing systematic evaluation of how a condition relates across hundreds of medical...

Title: "Neural Encoding of Complex Acoustic Cues: Implications for Spatial Hearing"

Speaker: Aditi Gargeshwari, Ph.D.

Understanding speech and locating sound sources are fundamental to everyday communication, yet these abilities are often profoundly disrupted in individuals with hearing loss, even when sounds are made audible through amplification or cochlear implants. In this talk, I examine how temporal fine structure (TFS) and envelope (ENV) cues support sound localization, and how limitations...